Malign contingency Strats and Tacts

You have the drones already deployed and hanging on tractors.

Weird Harold wrote:

Theemile wrote:Another case - Manticore never found Bolthole. They looked actively for 3 years and never found it - and Manticore knows the "relative" area of space Bolthole has to be in.

IIRC, Bolthole couldn't be found in that "relative area" it had to be in because it wasn't inside the boundaries of Haven -- IOW, not in the space "it had to be in."

And it was noted that they were expanding their search outside the borders at one point.

My point was more of, absent a previously unknown wormhole, we know Bolthole probably cannot be too far from Haven space - so we would not look for it by, say, Beowulf. Looking for Darius, or the Malign's next home, there are no such limitations.

Theemile wrote:Ever see this work in the Honorverse? Did The Gauntlet see the em signature of the repair ship and CAs floating about in the out system? Were that able to see the settlements on Tiberian?

Warships of course can hide. I'm talking about populated planets.

There are plenty of examples where human habitation is not seen in the honorverse immediately from a distance - hidden stations and habitats abound in Silesia. To see what was going on in Basilisk in OBS, Honor had to deploy 50-100 becon drones to watch for ships coming and going. To get a good grip on the inner system Ships now need to throw up sensor nets of 100's on Millions of dollars of credits, just to watch the hyperlimit.

The presence/absence of electromagnetic energy won't tell you anything about what's going on, just whether there's anybody there in the first place.

Another case - Manticore never found Bolthole. They looked actively for 3 years and never found it - and Manticore knows the "relative" area of space Bolthole has to be in.

Probing during times of war isn't easy.

No where have we seen system omniscience from just a few minutes in a system. And to thow up a shell of drones in a system is expensive - The cost of drones in hundreds of systems is prohibitive.

I'm not saying omniscience--just an answer as to whether the system is inhabited. When has that even been an issue in the books?

Loren Pechtel wrote:I'm not saying omniscience--just an answer as to whether the system is inhabited. When has that even been an issue in the books?

A single Honorverse destroyer has a reactor that produces more power (and heat) than the entire electrical generation capacity of earth. So if you can't spot a fleet...

Weird Harold wrote:

Theemile wrote:Another case - Manticore never found Bolthole. They looked actively for 3 years and never found it - and Manticore knows the "relative" area of space Bolthole has to be in.

IIRC, Bolthole couldn't be found in that "relative area" it had to be in because it wasn't inside the boundaries of Haven -- IOW, not in the space "it had to be in."

That's another one of those things, like "Bolthole was set up by the Legislaturalists", that Pat Givens believed at one time, but was not actually true. She's very good at her job, but is not perfect.

See the 'on the origins of Bolthole' article in the Pearls for more.

On the subject of Hidden Planets, let us recall that The Esteemed Author has done this before, at least once. During the Bug War, the Bugs discovered The System Which Must Be Concealed, and the Terran/Orion/Etc. Alliance never found it. This leads me to believe (because authors often repeat themselves) that the Alignment's Hidden Planet will be found at the far end of an otherwise unknown hyperbridge. Now your searchers must also scan every system for Termini. Good luck with that!

We don't actually see ships arriving at or arriving from Bolthole nor do we see where they arrive from Bolthole. It would appear that the people taking ships to and from Bolthole "don't get out much" in terms of going anywhere but back to Bolthole. That would be the astrogators, pilots, and anybody that would be navigating the ship. Ideally, Haven would take a ship with just enough crew to move it (wormhole, hyperspace, any combination) and deliver it to a point in space -changing that point very often- and take the transfer crew off before putting the primary crew on.

We don't know where Darius is. We can't even make the assumption that the length of the wormhole is shorter than the longest published and used wormhole in human occupied space. What it it is 600ly long and diagonal to the elliptic of the galaxy in the direction of the center & up to the top of the disk? How much in the way of stellar activity is between there and present (nonAlignment) human space and would get in the way of human created electromagnetic emissions? It is more than possible that the Alignment has been building up the Darius side of each of the wormholes leading to the Alignment Network and if you don't know where to head -since attacking through the x-Darius wormhole once you know it exists is going to be impossible in any realistic sense. So, you don't know where the star for the Darius system is and IF it is 600 LY "away" how the hell are you going to know where to start looking- and then hope to get a report back- to be able to send a fleet there through hyperspace. And using the non-return of a scout ship to chose a direction, while possible, is more likely to get a multi-ship scout team sent to try and determine the cause of lack of return.

I'm reasonably sure that the Alignment has taken note of the visable defenses at the Junction. How could they not, all sorts of merchant shipping has and continues to move through the junction and just from optical observations you can get an idea of how many forts, mines, hyper-space capable ships are in positions to defend against transits even without sneaking a passive set of really high end and sensitive military sensors though on some freighter that is otherwise appearing harmless. It's not like the Alignment can't produce enough crew and hardware to replicate the defences of the junction even in terms of SLN weapons perhaps with Cataphract enhancements being deployed now in addition to the SLN level missile and energy weapons.

Different question: Does the vector for entering a wormhole have any relevence to the direction of the other end of that wormhole? We have these nice maps showing wormhole locations but somehow it hasn't been said that if you enter the Sigma Draconis wormhole going in a vector roughly of where Manticore is, you come out at the Manticore Junction. It's a wormhole, the direction you enter it and the place you exit it don't have to line up. There is also nothing to say exactly what the actual path is to the other end except it is like going though the looking glass. Enter-leave (if you do everything right).

drothgery wrote: That's another one of those things, like "Bolthole was set up by the Legislaturalists", that Pat Givens believed at one time, but was not actually true. She's very good at her job, but is not perfect.

See the 'on the origins of Bolthole' article in the Pearls for more.

Except it's also in the books, that the Legislaturalists did, and it was in a briefing of Theisman and Pritchart. The Legislaturalists set it up (or at the very minimum, conceivved the idea of an uber secret shipyard), Pierre and Saint-Just took it and ran with it using slave labour from Hades, and Pritchart and Theisman simply continued to use it although more ethically.

Bolthole's something that had to be changed and adapted as the story evolved. After all, the Pearl says that Bolthole was started by Pierre and Saint-Just, but it also goes on to say:

The system in question, however, was "off the charts" as far as foreign intelligence agencies were concerned for several reasons. The main one is its extreme distance from Haven -- there's a reason Theisman can only get out there once or twice a year. It's way far on the other side of the RH's space from the SKM, and in an area which, overall, was never noted for its industrial or economic muscle before

Extreme distance, yet also in the manner of almost a 'day trip' for Theisman, who as both the Secretary of War *AND* Chief of Naval Operations, is not someone who can disappear for more than a day, perhaps two, and somebody not noticing. Keep that 2 day limit in mind, and then think from the Alliance side, Yeltsin is almost a full 7 days away from Manticore, closer to 4 if you play games with your hyper generator.

That puts the absolute maximum distance as half of the distance between Yeltsin and Manticore Binary, yet it's still been unscouted. It has to be way the hell away from Haven, possibly outside the official Haven borders, but it's still a 2-3 day trip max from Haven. Even a streak drive ship would have trouble pulling that off without some other, even faster method of travel like a wormhole.

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:I'm not saying omniscience--just an answer as to whether the system is inhabited. When has that even been an issue in the books?

A single Honorverse destroyer has a reactor that produces more power (and heat) than the entire electrical generation capacity of earth. So if you can't spot a fleet...

I'm not talking about spotting heat. I'm talking about spotting radio being used to communicate, or radio leaking from equipment.

Warships are stealthed, if they're not transmitting you won't see them. Civilizations are another matter. What about our cell phones? NASA can detect (but not listen to) one from Saturn. (The Huygens transmitter was of cell phone power levels--and they could detect it.)

Loren Pechtel wrote:

kzt wrote:A single Honorverse destroyer has a reactor that produces more power (and heat) than the entire electrical generation capacity of earth. So if you can't spot a fleet...

I'm not talking about spotting heat. I'm talking about spotting radio being used to communicate, or radio leaking from equipment.

Warships are stealthed, if they're not transmitting you won't see them. Civilizations are another matter. What about our cell phones? NASA can detect (but not listen to) one from Saturn. (The Huygens transmitter was of cell phone power levels--and they could detect it.)

You missed the bit, there are hundreds if not thousands of habitats and such in Silesia, and they are extremely hard to detect.

Also, does Honorverse even still use RF radios? Isn't there something in one or another of the books that basically implies RF is so antique, nobody in their right mind uses it?